“Absolutely nothing,” she said. “Just some people eating lunch. Surely you guys have got better things to do.” She turned to walk away.
“Wait a minute, ma’am,” the reporter called. “I need your name, in case we use this footage.”
“Augusta McKenzie,” Nora called back.
They walked back to the parking garage in silence. The afternoon was shading toward dusk, and a chill crept into the air. The sounds of the afternoon city seemed to fade a little. Peyton realized that she was shaking all over, a fine trembling.
When the car came, Nora said, “You still up for an early dinner? Can you eat after that hamburger? Or do you just want to go home? You’ve had a long day. By the way, Peyton, I’m proud of you.”
“I’m still a little hungry,” Peyton lied. “I’m really in the mood for some Italian food.”
“You got it,” Nora said, smiling, and she turned the car north up Peachtree Street toward Buckhead.
“Are you going to tell him?” Peyton asked as Nora swung the car to the curb in front of their house.
“Tell him what?”
“Any of it. You know. The sit-in and all that stuff. That I drank wine.”
“You didn’t drink enough wine to make a chicken blink. It’s a sin to eat ravioli without wine. No. I’m not going to tell him anything, unless you do first. I won’t lie, but I won’t tell him, either. That’s for you to decide. This was your day.”
“I don’t think I will,” Peyton said. The day and night hung glittering like a Christmas ornament in her mind. All hers. Just hers and Nora’s.
“Good. Everybody ought to have one or two strictly private things.”
The house was dark. It was still early, but her father often went to bed early and read. Peyton’s muscles relaxed slightly. It would not be required of her, then to share this day and night. Her own private thing.…
“Well, it’s a pity, but let’s do it. All good things must end,” Nora said, and she flipped her cigarette into the street, where it glowed like a small beacon and then winked out. She had smoked steadily coming home in the car, top down, cold wind rushing past them, warm air from the heater flowing up to embrace them. None of the discarded cigarettes had blown back into the car. Peyton could not imagine why.
“Because they’re magic cigarettes,” Nora said. “They don’t burn anything but themselves. Life lesson number one: Don’t burn anything but yourself.”
They had sung all the way home, loudly, the bawdy songs Nora said she had learned at college: “The Night They Shagged O’Reilly’s Daughter,” “Roll Your Leg Over,” “Dirty Lil.” When they veered off the interstate and swept onto the unlighted farm road that led over to Lytton, the moon spilled down on them so close and white that Peyton gasped. They rode the rest of the way singing “Moon River.” When they stopped in front of the house, Peyton felt tears tremble on her lower lids. It had been a perfect thing, this day and night.
They tiptoed inside, and a light went on in the kitchen.
“Oh, shit,” Nora said softly.
Her father came into the room. He was still dressed, wearing his tan Perry Como cardigan and tweed pants and house slippers. His face was remote. Peyton knew he was displeased.
He said nothing, merely looked at Nora. She, too, was silent, only smiling a little.
Peyton heard her voice spilling out of her like a broken water main: “Oh, Daddy, it was just wonderful! We had lunch in a Jewish deli and then we rode through Buckhead—you should see the houses there, Daddy, they’re mansions—and then we went to this Italian place and I had ravioli, it’s like these little pouches with sausage in them and sauce on them, and dessert called cannoli—”
She stopped and looked up at him. His face remained closed and still, and then he smiled.
“You had a big day, didn’t you?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” Peyton breathed in relief and exultation.
“It was a good day,” Nora said. “Maybe next time you’ll come with us.”
“Maybe I will,” he said.
10
That night, and for many, many nights afterward, Peyton wrote in her diary. At first she sat cross-legged on her bed, Trailways snugged into the curve of her thigh, and stared at the first blank page.
I have no idea how to write in a diary, she thought. Do you write what you did, or what you thought, or what you think of other people, or what?
“It’s just for you,” Nora’s voice repeated in her head. “Nobody will ever see it unless you show it to them. Write anything in the world you want to. Write fuck shit piss over and over, if you like. Talk about what you’re reading. Talk about what Trailways looks like when he lies in that patch of sunlight on the diningroom table. Write who you hate and who you love. The whole point is to have a record of how you really were at twelve going on thirteen. I can promise you you’re not going to remember yourself that way. It’ll be good to be able to look back and check in with the real Peyton McKenzie circa nineteen sixty-one.”
Tentatively, Peyton wrote the date and then, Today I went into Atlanta with my Cousin Nora and had lunch at a Jewish delicatessen and dinner at an Italian restaurant. I had ravioli and cannoli and Chianti wine. It was good. We sang Nora’s college songs on the way home. Daddy wasn’t as mad as I thought he’d be.
She stopped, and then she wrote, I was in a sit-in. There wasn’t much to it, but I think I’m glad I did it. I’ve never eaten with Negroes before, not Negroes I don’t know. It was just like anybody else. It’s very late and Trailways looks like a pile of feathers from a Dominecker rooster. I can feel his purr all the way up my leg and into my chest. Good-bye. Peyton McKenzie.
She was at the toolshed five minutes early on Monday afternoon. Ernie was heating water; that meant the dreaded powdered hot chocolate. He looked up at her sourly. It struck her that she could not remember the last time he’d laughed. Ernie did laugh, infrequently—a painful, rusty laugh that sounded as disused as it was. Or at least he used to. Peyton’s embellished stories of humiliation at the hands of the cheerleaders had once brought a cackle of enjoyment, and he often laughed outright at Boot’s cheerful litany of self-abasement. Peyton wondered if he was tiring of their stories. He had not himself volunteered any loser’s stories in a while. Either his arachnid mother had lost her venom or Ernie had developed immunity.
It’s not fair that it’s just us being losers, she thought. It’s no good if he’s not a part of it. It isn’t the Losers Club anymore.
“I hear Cinderella had a big time at the ball Saturday,” he said, not turning from his fussing with the chocolate. “I hear she came in so late that her coach almost turned into a pumpkin, and her coachman into a rat.”
“It wasn’t late. We were home by nine-thirty. We had dinner earlier than we liked, but we thought Daddy might worry.”
Peyton spoke with the weariness of one who habitually dined at nine but was accommodating a doting elder. She did not even ask where Ernie had got his information. He snorted.
“Where did you dine?” he said. “The Varsity? The S and W Cafeteria?”
“At a little Jewish delicatessen for lunch, and at Biuso’s for dinner. It was quite good. I had ravioli—that’s a little dumpling stuffed with—”
“I know what ravioli is,” Ernie said.
“Well, and then we had cannoli and some wine. Chianti, actually. It’s a pretty little restaurant. It’s in Buckhead.”
“Don’t tell me,” Ernie said. “Red-checked tablecloths. Candles in Chianti bottles. Artificial grapevines crawling all over the place. Murals of Mount Etna on the walls. ‘Santa Lucia’ on the Muzak.”
“You’ve been there?”
“To about a million places like it. Atlanta doesn’t have any true Italian restaurants. You couldn’t get Tuscan cuisine if you lay down and begged for it. Nobody ever heard of a truffle.”
“Huh,” said Peyton, who had not, either. “How long has it been since you’ve even left Lytton?”
He flushed, a dull br
ick-red.
“You know I can’t leave Mother anymore,” he said.
Boot clumped in then, slamming the door and yelling in his reedy cricket voice, “Hey Peyton, tell us about your ride up to Atlanta in that Thunderbird. I hear you didn’t get home till midnight. Boy, I bet your daddy come down on you like a duck on a june bug.”
“I got home at nine-thirty exactly,” Peyton said. “The rumor machine must be working overtime.”
“Yeah, it is. Tell,” Boot said, and he plopped himself down on the spavined wicker armchair that was his accustomed place.
“Well,” Peyton said, “there isn’t much to tell. We shopped a little at the Peachtree Arcade, and then we walked to a Jewish delicatessen and had lunch—”
“What did you have?” Ernie put in. “Chopped liver? Gefilte fish?”
“What that?” Boot said suspiciously.
“I had a hamburger,” Peyton mumbled. It was a rule at the Losers Club that they would never lie. They could embellish, but outright untruths were grounds for expulsion.
“Big whoop,” Ernie said.
Peyton’s face burned.
“I was in a sit-in,” she said, spilling it out. She had sworn never to tell anyone about it. The television news had not aired the brief exchange with Nora, and apparently no one in Lytton had even heard about the four young Negroes who had sat for hours in a delicatessen in Atlanta, staring at an empty counter.
“You were not,” Ernie spat.
“I was, too! You ask Nora! We saw this big crowd at the deli, so we looked in and there were these Negroes sitting at the counter and nobody would serve them, and we went in and sat down and Nora ordered six hamburgers and gave them four of them. And when we left the television guy asked her what had happened and she said ‘Nothing’ and when he asked her name she said ‘Augusta McKenzie.’”
They were silent for a moment. Sickly, Peyton realized that she had spilled out everything she and Nora had agreed not to speak of in one spasmodic rush. She did not think Ernie would say anything—oddly, he gossiped only with them—but she had little hope that the ebullient Boot would keep quiet.
“Whoo Jeesus!” Boot squalled in delight. “Was that on the television?”
“No.”
“You better be glad. Yo’ aunt skin you alive if she see that, and Nora, too. Does Mamaw know about it?”
“No.”
“Well,” he said generously, “I ain’t gon’ tell her, then.”
Ernie drained his cup and put it down and leaned back in his leather chair.
“Peyton, it strikes me that you haven’t had a real loser’s story in quite a while,” he drawled. “All we’ve been hearing about is your riding around in that sports car and going to Atlanta for lunch and dinner. Oh, and getting a new hairdo and new clothes. Tell me, where’s the loser in that?”
Peyton stared at him. What he said was true. She had not had a real moment of humiliation to share since…since Nora came. A wind from somewhere far off brushed her heart.
“Well, there was the sit-in. You know what Daddy and Aunt Augusta would say if they knew about that…”
“It doesn’t matter about your Aunt Augusta,” Ernie said. “She’s going to think everything you do is awful. I’m not so sure about your father. There are some people who would say what you did was a good thing, not something to be ashamed of.”
There was another silence.
“Well, I done it yesterday,” Boot said. “I dropped a bottle of cranberry juice in the middle of the A&P and didn’t have no money to pay for it, so the sto’ people made me mop it up.”
He grinned broadly. Peyton, who once would have grinned with him, winced. Soon after that they went home. Ernie in one of his distant moods was impervious to even the most delectable humiliation.
Nora’s first experimental English class was held the following Monday at Carver High, the black school literally across the railroad tracks from the main body of Lytton. It consisted of honors English students from both high schools, grades ten through twelve. It was held at Carver because the school board thought it only courteous for the white school to make the first visit.
“Like the home team honoring the out-of-towners,” Nora said to Peyton and Frazier at supper the night before, “or more like testing the waters and seeing who’s going to beat the hell out of whom before it happens on white territory.”
Frazier looked at her.
“Does the idea of any of that bother you?” he asked. “Because if it does, we can assign a male teaching aide for you until things settle down.”
“My God, no,” Nora laughed. “This is small potatoes to the lady who handled a village full of horny teenagers drunk on rum after the last cane harvest.”
“What did you do?” Peyton asked.
“I told them I was going to summon a nganga to come and shrivel up their peckers and then kill a rooster to make sure it stuck. It worked like a charm. Santería and brujería are common out in the provinces in Cuba. And the Cubans are great natural lovers. It would be a fate worse than death to any teenager.”
Peyton felt herself blush and slid a look at her father.
“I guess that would do it, yes,” he said mildly. But there was the slightest tug at the corners of his mouth.
The class was scheduled for ten in the morning. By noon the news of it was scattering through the grammar school like spilled mercury. Two Negro boys had beat up the captain of the white football team, and there was going to be a full-scale reprisal one night soon. In fact, it wasn’t two Negro boys at all, it was Jerry Mooney, the massive, truculent captain of the wrestling team, and he had attacked a Negro boy, much smaller, in the bathroom at recess. Miss Findlay threw him out of class with both hands and a foot on his bottom. Miss Findlay made the white students sit by the Negroes and threatened to fail anyone who opened his mouth about it. When two of the white cheerleaders who had somehow managed to stumble into the class made whispered fun of a fat Negro girl, Miss Findlay put her arms around the sobbing girl and rocked her like a child, and told the cheerleaders she was going to do everything she could to get the cheerleading squad suspended for the rest of the year. Then she sent them back to Lytton High. They left smirking and switching their trim behinds, but there was an unease in their blue eyes that had never been there before. Somehow nobody doubted that Miss Findlay could and would do what she said she would.
After the white students left to go back to their own school for lunch, Miss Findlay stayed behind for her lunch and ate it in the company of the enormous, shining black principal. Both, when last seen, were licking their fingers and laughing.
Students swarmed around Peyton when school was out. Was her cousin going to have Negro teachers over for dinner at Peyton’s house? Was it true that she had made the white students use the Negro bathrooms? Would the Negroes use the white ones when they came to Lytton High? Was she going to join Saint John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church? Was she dating the Negro principal?
Nora laughed so hard when Peyton relayed these concerns that she choked on her cigarette and smoke exploded from her nostrils.
“Well, here’s what you tell them,” she said. “A: Maybe, if they ask me over to theirs first. B: If anybody wants to pee, they’ll do it in the nearest bathroom, wherever that happens to be. C: I’ll probably go to some services at Saint John’s. I love the singing. D: Certainly not. He’s married. But if he weren’t, that would be a different story.”
“What did you do for your first class?”
“Well, after I got all the sniggering quieted down, I read to them from To Kill a Mocking-bird. You know I told you I thought I would. Then I picked out passages and asked them to read aloud.”
“What parts?”
“The earliest parts, where Scout tells us about Maycomb and how it was in the summers in that time, and about the people who lived there and what they thought and did. I wanted them to see how closely literature comes to the lives they know themselves, even though it happened in anothe
r time and place. And I think they got it, finally. Of course, none of them reads aloud very well, black or white, but toward the end nobody was embarrassed anymore, and everyone was raising their hand to say how they thought Lytton was like Maycomb. They’re very quick, if not articulate. Some of the comparisons were really interesting.”
“Will you tell me about them?”
“Maybe one day. Right now I’m going to write them all down and see if I can maybe get a little book out of it by the end of the year. The same pieces of literature, seen through black and white eyes. I love the idea.”
“A book! Would it get published?”
“I have no idea,” Nora said. “I won’t be doing it to publish it. I’m doing it just because it interests me and I like to write. But I’ll let you read it when I’m far enough along.”
“I wish I could take that class,” Peyton said.
“My English class is stupid. Mrs. Manning just assigned us Little Women. I stopped reading that stuff when I was ten and Miss Laura Willingham let me get books out of the adult section of the library. We never told Aunt Augusta. I’ve almost finished Mockingbird already.”
“Well, I can’t let you come to this one, but maybe we could sort of review what I’ve been doing in class every afternoon or so. You can read along with us. Or even better, you write down what you think about it and we’ll go over it and compare it to what my high-schoolers said. I bet you’ll be way ahead of them.”
“Well, maybe,” Peyton said, thinking she would rather die than let anyone read anything she had written. And yet, to meet these high-schoolers on their own ground and beat them.…
“If you’re still here next year, maybe I could take one of your classes,” she said. “I’ll almost be in high school then.”
“My Lord, so you will,” Nora said, looking at her and smiling. “I should have remembered. And you have a birthday this summer, too, don’t you?”
“In June. Right after graduation.”
“Ah, graduation. Is there a commencement? When I started high school all you did was just show up.”
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